"Swimmy!"
Tanya jumped off her bike and ran over to the giant stuffed whale, beached on the sidewalk. Her mother walking alongside her stopped too. "He's hurt, Momma!". Her mother stared puzzeled at the giant blue mass of cloth her daughter was hugging close to her. How the hell had it gotten back here? Tired of that bloody whale taking up most of the living room, she had thrown it onto a flatbed tuck from their window, and watched it be driven down the street. She told Tanya she'd set him free to be with the other whales, but since doing so, Tanya had cried every night before going to sleep without him. If it brought some quiet to her house to have him back, she didn't care how he had gotten here.
"Well let's take him back with us, honey, and brush some of the dirt off him. He'll be fine when he's cleaned up."
Swimmy had been to the ocean, though. Nestled between crates, the flatbed had taken him 300 miles to the Pacific before teenagers had stolen him, taken photos, and left him on the beach. A man wearing a suit picked him up and put him in his car as a present for his two year old son, about 20 minutes before being carjacked. The car was loaded onto a transporter with four others and moved south for selling on, when the transporter driver noticed Swimmy and sold him to tourists for a dollar. Two days later, their kids left him by the pool where drunk-out-of-their-minds college students found him, and decided 'Whales like beer too!' and took the giant stuffed animal on a two-day bar crawl, before the students were arrested for being drunk and disorderly, right outside Tanya's apartment, leaving the whale on the sidewalk.
"Maybe God brought him back...", Tanya mused the next day, her mother sucking at her teeth out of atheism.
"I think it's just a coincidence", she replied.
"No, he wanted to come back. Definitely." That was the last they spoke of how a giant blue whale got to be in the living room.
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